Trust in Pluribus

There’s a good chance Pluribus will alienate you with its deliberate pace and high-wire premise. There’s an equally good chance Pluribus will completely take over your life for the few weeks it runs on Apple TV. In Vince Gilligan’s first new television project since Better Call Saul and the larger Breaking Bad universe, scenes unfold naturalistically, with characters performing tasks in real time, uncut and unhurried. A profound quiet hums beneath every frame. In that stillness, the series feels like an argument against our current hyperstimulated existence and uneasiness with anything that doesn’t immediately seize attention or resolve a question. If that all sounds a touch lofty, don’t let it turn you off: You owe it to yourself to give Pluribus a chance. Something glorious is gestating inside this entrancing piece of television, and to experience its full effect, you have to trust the process.

Pluribus finds Gilligan tapping into the eerie sensibility of his past work on The X-Files, where evocative sci-fi concepts were used to draw out big ideas and explorations of character. It also reunites him with Rhea Seehorn, who was sublime in Better Call Saul as Kim Wexler, the lawyer tracking alongside Saul Goodman’s moral descent. Here, she plays Carol Sturka, a grouchy romantasy author who doesn’t think much of her readers or, for that matter, everyone else around her. Her worldview turns ironic when a sudden global event, the source of which is depicted but not entirely explained, ushers in what basically amounts to world peace for almost everyone besides Carol. (Pluribus, of course, is Latin for “of many,” as in E pluribus unum, the American motto meaning “Out of many, one.”) She rejects this newfound unity, understanding it as the result of something essential having broken, and the show follows her as she wrestles with the situation and how to turn everything back to the way it was.

The series that unfolds over the seven of nine episodes that were made available to critics is unique to say the least, though not entirely without precedent. The delightfully odd The Last Man on Earth, anchored by Will Forte, might come to mind as a distant cousin, though that show ultimately worked out to be closer to a postapocalyptic ensemble comedy. Pluribus, by contrast, fundamentally commits to Carol’s aloneness, and it isolates her even further by unfolding without a traditional mystery-box framework. There are certainly mysteries (How does this new world work? Can Carol actually change things back?), but Gilligan and his team swiftly make it clear that the pursuit of answers isn’t going to be what propels the show forward. Pluribus is, instead, almost pure character study. As it observes Carol, the show draws us into its real interests, which are the rich, unsettling ideas stirred by her strange new reality. What does this state of affairs suggest about the human condition? Why change things back? And if you’re Carol, how do you manage the sheer uncertainty of what the world will look like if you’re successful?

In practice, that means episodes luxuriate in depicting process and atmosphere. A remarkable stretch of the premiere follows Carol as she laboriously figures out how to load someone into the back of a pickup truck; a later episode opens with a long, wordless sequence tracking a journey across continents. Gilligan-heads will recognize this as a maximalist expansion of a familiar sensibility. Starting in the latter half of Breaking Bad, and deepening throughout Better Call Saul (co-created with Peter Gould, who consulted on Pluribus), Gilligan’s storytelling is often punctuated by meditative extended sequences that simply observe its characters existing in the world. Think of Walt and Jesse’s meticulous cook sessions or a two-minute sequence in Saul’s second season that depicts Kim grinding her way back into her law firm’s good graces. These montages are meant to move time along, sure, but they’re also keen expressions of how Gilligan and his creative teams have always understood that so much character development can happen outside of story beats. Humanity is found not only in conflict and interaction but also the spaces in between. The person you are when you’re waiting on the phone is as much the person you are when you’re arguing with someone through it.

That Pluribus takes space to linger on these moments speaks to the assuredness of a celebrated creator gifted a blank check. With a two-season order already locked in, Gilligan is clearly having a lot of fun with all that Apple TV money. Most of the show is set in Albuquerque, the showrunner’s artistic home base since Breaking Bad, and his affection for the place shines through. Pluribus is consistently gorgeous to look at, from the tasteful southwestern touches in Carol’s home to the azure desert sky that stretches forever. But the show also expands beyond Gilligan’s usual terrain, taking on a grander, globe-trotting scale as it goes on. The production reportedly built Carol’s entire house and cul-de-sac from scratch, and procured whole aircrafts, hotels, and even a Sprouts market to stage the story’s surreal scenarios.

Pluribus does, however, lack one luxury enjoyed by its Gilliganian predecessors: a propulsive narrative engine. Breaking Bad was powered by the urgency of Walter White’s ticking clock, his need to secure enough money for his family before cancer took him; by the time his cancer went into remission, enough story had developed to place him in direct conflict with external threats and internal moral decay. Better Call Saul, meanwhile, had the built-in pull of a prequel as it pieced together how familiar characters became who we knew they’d become, in particular Kim, who was conspicuously absent from Breaking Bad. Confident these story mechanics would hold the audience’s attention, Gilligan and his collaborators had the freedom to slow down, to linger, to teach viewers to love the rhythm of a coffee percolator.

Pluribus is all percolator, less interested in moving through story than in reacquainting us with the thrill of watching something unfold, the disquiet that comes from sitting too long with a feeling, and the strange clarity that emerges when your brain syncs to its rhythm. It’s slow television in the truest sense: deliberate and meandering, both thrilling and confounding in its refusal to yield payoff, immediate or otherwise. There’s so much pleasure to be found in letting its slowness wash over you, and a big reason all of it works is the remarkable Seehorn, who can convey more with a furrowed brow than most actors can in a page of dialogue. She makes it easy to comply with Pluribus’s insistence on total presence as it meditates on something essential about humankind. You may watch and wonder what it’s all building toward and what it’s all about, but by the time each episode ends, you’ll find yourself savoring the silence it gave you to think everything through.

The first two episodes of Pluribus are now streaming on Apple TV.

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